Part 128 (2/2)

But there is nothing that need puzzle us in such ignorance, if it really existed. Martin may well have remembered the words he did not understand and which he afterwards attributed to his Archangel still without understanding them.

The visions recurred at brief intervals. On Sunday, March 31, the Archangel appeared to him in the garden, took his hand, which he pressed affectionately, opened his coat and displayed a bosom of so dazzling a whiteness that Martin could not bear to gaze on it. Then he took off his hat.

”Behold my forehead,” he said, ”and give heed that it beareth not the mark of the beast whereby the fallen angels were sealed.”

Louis XVIII expressed a desire to see Martin and to question him. The King, like his favourite Minister, believed the visionary to be a tool in the hands of the extreme party.

On Tuesday, April 2, Martin was taken to the Tuileries and brought into the King's closet, where was also M. Decazes. As soon as the King saw the farmer, he said to him: ”Martin, I salute you.”

Then he signed to his Minister to withdraw. Thereupon Martin, according to his own telling, repeated to the King all that the Archangel had revealed to him, and disclosed to Louis XVIII sundry secret matters concerning the years he had spent in exile; finally he made known to him certain plots which had been formed against his person. Then the King, profoundly agitated and in tears, raised his hands and his eyes to heaven and said to Martin:

”Martin, these are things which must never be known save to you and to me.”

The visionary promised him absolute secrecy.

Such was the interview of April 2, according to the account given of it by Martin, who then, under the influence of M. La Perruque's sermons, was an infatuated Royalist. It would be interesting to know more of this priest whose inspiration is obvious throughout the whole story. Louis XVIII agreed with M. Decazes that the man was quite harmless; and he was sent back to his plough.

Later, the agents of one of those false dauphins so numerous under the Restoration, got hold of Martin and made use of him in their own interest. After Louis XVIII's death, under the influence of these adventurers, the poor man, reconst.i.tuting the story of his interview with the late King, introduced into it other revelations he claimed to have received and completely changed the whole character of the incident. In this second version the pa.s.sionate Royalist of 1816 was transformed into an accusing prophet, who came to the King's own palace to denounce him as a usurper and a regicide, forbidding him in G.o.d's name to be crowned at Reims.

Such ramblings I cannot relate at length. They are to be found fully detailed in the book of M. Paul Marin. The author of this work would have done well to indicate that these follies were suggested to the unhappy man by the partisans of Naundorf, who was pa.s.sing himself off as the Duke of Normandy, who had escaped from the Temple.

Thomas Ignace Martin died at Chartres in 1834. It is alleged, but it has never been proved, that he was poisoned.[2767]

[Footnote 2767: _Rapport adresse a S. Ex. le Ministre de la Police Generale sur l'etat du nomme Martin, envoye par son ordre a la maison royale de Charenton, le 13 Mars, 1816, par MM. Pinel, medecin en chef de l'hopital de la Salpetriere, et Royer-Collard, medecin en chef de la maison royale de Charenton, et l'un et l'autre professeurs a la faculte de medecine de Paris._ Inscribed at the end with the date--Paris, 6 May, 1816--39 pages in 4'o MS. in the library of the author. Le Capitaine Paul Marin, _Thomas Martin de Gallardon Les Medecins et les thaumaturges du XIX'e siecle_, Paris, s.d. in 18'o. _Memoires de la Comtesse de Boignes_, edited by Charles Nicoullaud, Paris, 1907, vol. iii. pp. 355 and _pa.s.sim_.]

APPENDIX IV

ICONOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There is no authentic picture of Jeanne. From her we know that at Arras she saw in the hands of a Scotsman a picture in which she was represented on her knees presenting a letter to her King. From her we know also that she never caused to be made either image or painting of herself, and that she was not aware of the existence of any such image or painting. The portrait painted by the Scotsman, which was doubtless very small, is unfortunately lost and no copy of it is known.[2768]

The slight pen-and-ink figure, drawn on a register of May 10, 1429, by a clerk of the Parlement of Paris, who had never seen the Maid, must be regarded as the mere scribbling of a scribe who was incapable of even designing a good initial letter.[2769] I shall not attempt to reconstruct the iconography of the Maid.[2770] The bronze equestrian statue in the Cluny Museum produces a grotesque effect that one is tempted to believe deliberate, if one may ascribe such an intention to an old sculptor. It dates from the reign of Charles VIII. It is a Saint George or a Saint Maurice, which, at a time doubtless quite recent, was taken to represent the Maid. Between the legs of the miserable jade, on which the figure is mounted, was engraved the inscription: _La pucelle dorlians_, a description which would not have been employed in the fifteenth century.[2771] About 1875, the Cluny Museum exhibited another statuette, slightly larger, in painted wood, which was also believed to be fifteenth century, and to represent Jeanne d'Arc. It was relegated to the store-room, when it turned out to be a bad seventeenth-century Saint Maurice from a church at Montargis.[2772] Any saint in armour is frequently described as a Jeanne d'Arc. This is what happened to a small fifteenth-century head wearing a helmet, found buried in the ground at Orleans, broken off from a statue and still bearing traces of painting: a work in good style and with a charming expression.[2773] I have not patience to relate how many initial letters of antiphonaries and sixteenth-, seventeenth- and even eighteenth-century miniatures have been touched up or repainted and pa.s.sed off as true and ancient representations of Jeanne. Many of them I have had the opportunity of seeing.[2774] On the other hand, if they were not so well known, it would give me pleasure to recall certain ma.n.u.scripts of the fifteenth century, which, like _Le Champion des Dames_ and _Les Vigiles de Charles VII_, contain miniatures in which the Maid is portrayed according to the fancy of the illuminator. Such pictures are interesting because they reveal her as she was imagined by those who lived during her lifetime or shortly afterwards. It is not their merit that appeals to us; they possess none; and in no way do they suggest Jean Foucquet.[2775]

[Footnote 2768: _Trial_, vol. i, pp. 100, 292.]

[Footnote 2769: There is a wood engraving of this figure in Wallon, _Jeanne d'Arc_, p. 95.]

[Footnote 2770: E. de Bouteiller and G. de Braux, _Notes iconographiques sur Jeanne d'Arc_, Paris and Orleans, 1879, in 18'o royal paper.]

[Footnote 2771: Reproduced in many works, notably opposite p. 17 in the book of E. de Bouteiller and G. de Braux, referred to above.]

[Footnote 2772: _Ibid._, see woodcut opposite p. 8.]

[Footnote 2773: In the Orleans Museum. A copper-plate engraving by M.

Georges Lavalley, in the _Jeanne d'Arc_, of M. Raoul Bergot, Tours, s.d. large 8'o.]

[Footnote 2774: Of this cla.s.s of so-called portrait, I will merely mention the miniature which serves as frontispiece to vol. iv. of _La Vrai Jeanne d'Arc_, of P. Ayroles, Paris, 1898, in large 8'o, and the miniature of the Spetz Collection, reproduced in the _Jeanne d'Arc_ of Canon Henri Debout, vol. ii. p. 103 (also in _The Maid of France_ by Andrew Lang, 1908. W.S.).]

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